Initiative 4: Educate using spatial learning at home and at school

We are building on the research carried out in Initiatives 1 through 3 to inform our efforts to educate in a way that fosters the growth of spatial skills and spatial learning in real-world learning settings. At the same time, the research carried out in Initiative 4 impacts the work carried out in Initiatives 1 through 3 as it helps to identify the kinds of STEM problems that students have difficulty with and the ways in which spatial learning can improve STEM achievement. While our educational research involves a broad range of age groups and STEM disciplines, we are currently focusing on research in two educational arenas: young children (PK through Grade 4), and higher education, with a focus on geoscience but additional work on other STEM disciplines such as engineering, chemistry and physics.

We chose to focus on early learners for several reasons. First, prior work suggests that the malleability of skills may be greatest early in life (Knudsen, Heckman, Cameron & Shonkoff, 2006). Further, early learning provides a foundation for everything that follows. Thus we believe that efforts to enhance spatial learning in preschool and elementary school age children may have large benefits in terms of building skills that have been shown to be important to STEM success. Moreover, we believe that building strong spatial skills early can help prevent spatial anxiety, an impediment to success in the STEM disciplines.

Our research aimed at improving spatial learning in young children occurs in two different educational settings: home and school. Our research in the home environment is observational. We are examining the spatial activities and spatial language that parents engage in with their children, and the relation between this input and children's development of spatial language and spatial skills. Although correlational, our analysis of a large longitudinal database that was gathered as part of an NIH-supported program project grant provides a rich source of hypotheses about the kinds of inputs that are important to building strong spatial skills. These hypotheses are leading to experimental studies that allow us to test whether the inputs that predict strong spatial skills are causal factors in the development of strong spatial skills.

Our research in the school environment uses a Teacher Work Circle (TWC) model, developed by Louis Gomez, to engage teachers as partners in developing new ways to spatialize the existing mathematics curriculum. In a series of TWCs, we are working with a group of teachers to develop activities that improve children’s spatial skills and knowledge of spatial language. Our work involves an iterative cycle of activities that starts with teachers and researchers collaborating to develop activities that strengthen spatial skills, teachers trying these activities out in their classrooms, and researchers assessing the frequency and fidelity of their implementations based on checklists that teachers fill out, classroom observations, and periodic meetings and interviews with teachers. We then work with teachers to improve, modify, and add to these activities, and the next iteration of development begins. In addition, we are assessing the impact of spatializing the curriculum by assessing children in experimental and control classrooms on a set of targeted spatial skills at the beginning and end of the school year. Our plan is to compile the curricular activities that are successful into a Spatial Toolkit (see Initiative 5).

Our second focus, geoscience, was chosen because this STEM discipline utilizes many spatial skills, including skills that fall in all four broad categories of spatial skills studied in Initiative 1. Further, our data indicate that geoscientists rate themselves as having more highly developed spatial skills of each of these types than other STEM scientists or individuals in non-STEM fields. Our efforts to improve spatial skill in geoscience students begin with identifying the spatial skills that students need to succeed in the geosciences, through observation of geoscience education, analysis of class materials, and prior published work in this area in the geosciences education literature. When we concentrate attention on particular STEM disciplines, such as our main testbed discipline of geoscience, we identify spatial skills required for expert functioning that have not yet received adequate attention within cognitive science. Thus the spatial skills that are important for success in particular STEM disciplines become the subject of our basic research efforts. In our geoscience research we are developing a test to measure each spatial skill we identify as relevant to expertise in this discipline, and use this set of tests to measure skill levels in experts, and to assess how these skills are acquired over time in geoscience students receiving particular kinds of instruction. This work will feed back to aid SILC's broader mission of characterizing spatial skills in STEM learning.

Working with geoscience experts provides a source of insight about what spatial skills are relevant to their discipline. It also helps guide our efforts to develop each spatial skill, identifying which spatial learning tools might be used in what ways to improve learning. These interventions are being collected into a resource for educators. We will form a group of practicing geoscientists as an analog to the Teacher Work Circle to help us understand the spatial skills that are important for geoscience problems and to help us develop a geosciences workbook. The workbook will provide faculty with a resource for improving students' spatial skills. The long-term goal will be a complete workbook that includes modules for improving each skill. The workbook will be a major contribution to the field because individual professors have had to struggle to help students develop requisite spatial skills on their own, often without much success.

One important component of work in Initiative 4 is the use of CogSketch to develop two types of educational software. Worksheets are a domain-general way of providing feedback and assessment concerning material where spatial configurations and layouts are involved. Design Buddy is aimed at helping engineering design students learn how to communicate via sketches. Students find design highly engaging, and consequently design courses are being added early in engineering programs to help attract and retain students, so technology that facilitates such courses could have an especially beneficial impact. By exploring two very different types of educational software, in quite different domains, we help ensure that CogSketch develops into a generally useful system. Our long-term goal is to bring CogSketch’s visual, spatial, and conceptual abilities to the point where it can model the full range of phenomena that occur when people sketch concerning STEM subjects. Clearly, achieving this goal is a tall order, but we can make an excellent start. We view bootstrapping the basic visual and spatial abilities as something that SILC can achieve, over a ten-year period. The basic conceptual reasoning abilities needed for fluent sketch understanding can, we believe, also be achieved during the same period. However, adding appropriate domain knowledge and domain-specific visuospatial skills is an extremely resource-intensive enterprise. Consequently, we decided to focus on two domains in SILC's first five years, geoscience and engineering design education, both of which make heavy use of sketching. During the second five years of SILC, we will go more deeply into modeling expertise and learning in other STEM domains, in order to develop the ideas and software to the point where others can build upon it for a broad variety of STEM areas and student ages. One longer-term goal is to enable CogSketch to support project-based classes more generally, where the need to have experts craft particular domain-specific software remains a significant stumbling block for providing computer-based scaffolding and portfolio assessment.

Supporting spatial learning in young children as well as in college students studying various STEM disciplines requires working on many fronts. It is not enough to study spatial processes by themselves; we must also work to remove known barriers to learning. To this end, SILC is exploring how working memory capacity and motivational and emotional processes impact learning. Studies with adults have shown that anxiety about mathematics negatively impacts math performance through its effects on working memory (Beilock, 2008), and a study carried out with an NSF supplement shows that early elementary teachers’ anxiety about mathematics negatively affects the mathematics learning of girls in their classrooms (Beilock et al., 2010). Given known stereotypes about gender and spatial ability, we are extending studies of this sort to the spatial domain.

Relevant links:

♦ http://www.teachspatial.org/ From their website: teachspatial.org is a collaborative web site devoted to promoting applications of spatial concepts and spatial tools in teaching and learning.

♦ Huttenlocher, J., Gunderson, E. A., & Levine, S. C. (2010). Number Development in Context: Variations in Home and School Input During the Preschool Years. In N. L. Stein & S. Raudenbush (Eds.), Developmental Cognitive Science Goes to School C:13. New York: Taylor and Francis.

♦ Ratliff, K.R., McGinnis, C.R. & Levine, S.C. (2010). The development and assessment of cross-sectioning ability in young children. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Portland, OR (August, 2010).

♦ Levine, S.C., (2009, April). Mathematics in early childhood education: A time for a new beginning. Paper presented at the Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting, Denver, Colorado.

♦ Ehrlich, S.B. & Levine, S.C. (2007, March) What low-SES children DO know about number: A comparison of hear start and tuition-based preschool children's number knowledge. Presented at Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development, Boston.